Pasta

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV programmes, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant, is probably best known for The Devil Wears Prada, a film I adore. His character in that film did wind me up, but it took a while before Tucci himself got on my nerves. I suppose it began with him coming over all cheffy, like he’s the new Anthony Bourdain. Who cares what Colin Firth eats when he’s round at the Tucci gaff? I kept being told to watch his TV series where he travels around Italy, but the sight of his smug face on my screen turned out to be more than I could bear.

In Texas the customers have opinions, and the opinions are always right, no matter how wrong. It was carbonara that taught me this crucial lesson. The diners at the restaurant where I worked brought the American talent for innovation to modifying what I had always considered a fairly simple, self-contained dish. Can you add fried chicken? Can you add grilled shrimp? Can you add meatballs? Can you add tomato sauce and meatballs? Can you do it without guanciale, without egg, without cheese? Can you do it like normal but put a fried egg on top? Can you replace the guanciale with a fillet of salmon? The answer is always yes. At the time, I was cooking at a neighborhood Italian place in a leafy part of Austin full of well-off old hippies, professional families and Texas politicos.

I arrived home six pounds heavier after three weeks in Sicily. That is the weight of a gallon of milk. Eight cans of beer. Or a small Yorkshire Terrier. I could try blaming the Cerebrus heatwave on my filthy granita habit and lack of almost any bodily movement (and it didn’t help) but the reality is this: Sicily is the fantastical realm they say it is and stupendously beautiful. And the food is even better.  Roman, Arab, French, Greek and North African influences spectacularize every meal. Almond milk granita is spooned into glistening brioche rolls before you can wipe the sleep from your eyes. Chocolate cannoli appear out of nowhere at breakfast. Arancini oozes globs of molten cheese in a manner that’s, quite frankly, sexy.

“Stealth wealth” became A Thing in 2023. TikTok was awash with “get the look!” fashion videos; magazines full of think pieces on crisp white shirts and camel cashmere. The idea is to ooze money — or at least look like you do — in classic, understated cuts and colors. What the Streeps and Paltrows have been doing for decades is now the standard for the aspirational and chronically online.  The trend came to mind as I tumbled into Rome’s five-star Anantara Palazzo Naiadi during the Cerberus heatwave. Slick with sweat, a suitcase half my size and missing one wheel, toenails unpainted and there to interview chef Heros de Agostinis, I wished I’d paid more attention. There are fancy hotels, then there are stratospherically fancy hotels like this one.

Why was it that when lockdown haunted our doors we all rushed out to buy pasta? Dry wheat in a bag in a funny shape. Cheap, yes, and ridiculously easy to cook. And, if the supermarket cheddar didn’t run out, very good with cheese. But still, pasta. Shouldn’t we have thought of something more inventive? Yet a spate of restaurants popping up round London with new enthusiasm now that we’re out and about again suggests that the Italian carb is enjoying a gourmet renaissance. Stevie Parle, founder of the fresh pasta restaurant Pastaio, speaks of pasta-making as an 'obsession'. The satisfaction of 'extruding pasta through bronze dies' and 'slow cooking delicious ragu' that he refers to when we speak sounds practically religious.